As an esthetic work, the movie is dismissable. As a social artifact, however, it's intriguing. Textually and sub-textually, intentionally or inadvertently, just what is being said here? [14 Aug 1992]

Given that his movie never gives us an opportunity to understand who these men are, it is hard to mourn them beyond a superficial fashion.

Within India’s multilingual cinematic universe, Malayalam cinema has long established its own narrative. Despite its occasional disjointedness, Nithin Lukose’s debut feature is a worthy addition to that tradition.

Although In My Country is charged with moments of grace and feeling, the film is ultimately betrayed by the clunky Jackson-Binoche romance.

The sounds are fine and, thanks to technology's ever-progressive march, the sights are even better. But that third S -- the story -- remains the sticking point, and ain't it always the way.

Offers you the ostensible bargain of two movies in one -- a character study at the outset and the crime caper that follows. The first picture is intriguing, the second stinks.

Director Azazel Jacobs has written (with Winger in mind) an unapologetically adult movie, in which it’s assumed that people in their 50s are as sexual and screwed up as people in their 20s and it’s a given that yearning never ends.

Rogen’s always a dominating presence, but the doll-like Australian actress, who showed her comic chops in "Bridesmaids," comes close to stealing the movie here, in an uncorked performance full of volatile, liberating mischief.

Despite his flair for trenchant dialogue, nicely complemented by Mark Isham's bluesy jazz score, Rudolph whets our appetite but then fails to deliver. The picture limps to its ending and leaves us with nothing to hold onto.

This is well-crafted retro horror, too familiar to be really scary but smart enough to be fun. And funny too, with the kind of pure laughs that grow organically from the script, untainted by the chemical spray of irony.

The movie is a series of ever more elaborate fight sequences and increasingly more and larger opponents.

May not be your idea of a fun European vacation, but Roth's trip offers horror fans more than the usual sick kicks.

Rather than build on the new momentum, this one's a bit more of a cruise-control effort.

A modest, hard-faced film, offering a nervous study of humanity and civil disobedience in a societal-bullying era.

Live Flesh is an often surprising assemblage of attractive parts that never seems to earn a full emotional response. [06 feb 1998]

It’s an action thriller that’s effective and never boring.

The setting is unique, the cast is terrific, the dialogue crackles and, if only there were a plot worth believing, In Bruges might have been a fine film.

Shiver-making moments aside, in a important way 127 Hours suffers from the filmmaker's lack of nerve, a reluctance to let the audience taste Ralston's dread and the expectation of a slow, absurd death.

It's a downbeat flick forged by an upbeat talent - despite the angst in the frames, you can feel the joy of the framer. [23 June 1995]

Morse and Donovan hold us rapt in this clearly told tale about identity confusion.

Director Steve Oedekerk, who also wrote the script, simply provides a frame for the string of Carrey sight gags, which come fast and constantly. Some work, some fall flat, but the overall momentum is never allowed to flag seriously.

There are jump-scares aplenty, and a great deal of barely visible shots of its monster, culminating in a full-on creature reveal that’s nicely gross. The characters are sketched out just enough to make you care whether they live or die, with solid performances from all involved, including a rare star turn from Messina.

If you’re after an action-packed adventure film set against turn-of-the-century Canadian wilderness, you’ll likely come away disappointed. If you’re looking for a good ol’ yarn – the kind where bad guys sneer, good guys sigh and a big dog rescues everyone and finds its true self in the process? Jackpot!

Chaplin is a mediocre movie that you can't take your eyes off. Your wandering mind is telling you one thing: This is a standard check-list biography, the kind of glossy whitewash that treats a man's accomplishments like so many vegetables from the produce aisle - toss 'em in, tick 'em off, and move on. But those riveted eyes are saying something else entirely - they're watching Robert Downey, Jr. with rapt attention, marvelling at his every move, pondering his every gesture.

All this is initially fascinating, and then progressively less so. The problem is the usual serial-killer issue – things, no matter how weird and kinky, get repetitive.

Lacks the energy and vibrancy of the best films to come out of the city in the past few years.

Alas, the filmmaker, maybe because he had to account for every week of his more than year-long visit to the Times, has crowded his film with too many subplots and way, way too many cameos of all the usual suspects, wringing their hands over what will become of newspapers.

Well acted and crisply directed, this latest version can at least make a claim to competence.

Along the way there are definitely some pleasing distractions, just not enough to obscure the growing realization that a much better picture could have been made, and wasn't. Many films never have a chance, but this one did – it's an opportunity wasted.

The impact should be visceral and gut-wrenching; instead, it's cool and cerebral – after all, we're being lectured in a lecture hall.

Although she lets her flair for creating funny, sharply written, quirky scenes consume her feature directorial debut, her use of family, friends and even an ex (Goldberg) in 2 Days In Paris, gives the film a wonderfully natural, comfy feel.

The Israeli film works best in isolated spots early on as a series of intriguing character studies. Upon reaching to become a lesson to the world, however, Walk on Water goes off the deep end.

Union Square's biggest flaw is its predictability.

By stripping the genre down to its essentials, long on the serial disasters but thankfully light on the stupid dialogue, [Petersen] not only maintains an acceptable modicum of suspense but -- here's the major bonus -- also manages to set a blissful speed record in the process, bringing his pricey blockbuster home to port in under 100 minutes.

Why is she a problematic pop star? That’s the premise, but I’m not sure we get the answer here.

This familiar and formulaic holiday tale has its pleasures, unless your name is Ebenezer – and in the end, even he was mollified.

Mainly the film is a tightly focused and tightly filmed neo-noir, as the script, which Akin co-wrote with Hark Bohm, neatly picks off parents and friends to leave Katja isolated enough to make her desperate actions believable.

V for very, very ordinary.

Minghella is a smart guy with splendid intentions but, ultimately, he's a victim here of his own liberal contrivances.

An okay thriller with lots of smart flourishes, The Next Three Days has us hooked early on but never quite gets us in the boat.

At times the film seems like a horrifying Nancy Drew story or a more sophisticated Scooby-Doo episode without the dog and with a face full of spiders.

Jeunet’s major achievement is to capture the book’s complicated museum clutter and hothouse-flower sensitivity.

There is something very wrong with the attempt of Nine 1/2 Weeks to excite the sensualists and appease the moralists at the same time. Most of the sex is fairly mild, but there are hints of what Nine 1/2 Weeks must have been before Lyne was forced to recut it. [21 Feb 1986, p.C1]

Feels like a bit of an emotional mugging.

Though often fascinating and beautiful to look at, Surviving Progress falls into the adapting-a-book-into-a-movie trap. Trying to do too much too fast.

The re-make, directed by Philip Kaufman, has lost its intellectual innocence and throws in everything from Chariots of the Gods to recombinant DNA - it's as clever and hip as a New Times investigative piece. Paradoxically, by being so smart, the re-make seems a bit dumber than the original. But it's dumb in a nice way. [22 Dec 1978]

The whole caper loses its rhythm and its direction around the two-thirds mark. By the finish, the punch has left the lines, and the once-purposeful energy goes mindlessly manic - gone are both the point and the parody.

It's a treat because, making no apologies for the source material, director Guillermo del Toro lets his picture gorge on power bars of pop energy, sugared with sprinkles of playful humour, and, at least twice, laced with a visual style so piercingly keen that horror morphs into beauty. Not bad for a pulpy outing.

The film is sometimes funny and occasionally smart yet never quite what it wants to be – funny and smart at the same time.

The film wraps mindless cartoon violence and a few fart jokes around life lessons about friendship and responsibility. Kids should like it; parents won't mind it.

Perhaps this is Anderson's version of a parlour game – walk into Phantom Thread expecting a portrait of a testy male genius as portrayed by another testy male genius, but be gifted with a stealth drama about the hidden lives of the women who suffer in his shadow.

In the hallowed frames of 42, the legend is front and centre and still inspiring. Too bad the more interesting man is nowhere to be seen.

Black comedies don't get much darker than this.

The one overwhelmingly positive thing that you’ve heard about The Whale is true: Fraser does a remarkable job.

Although veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping ( Kill Bill, The Matrix) handles the wire action, the camera work is merely okay and the sequences are on the familiar side. Still, it's fun to see Chan resurrect his loopy, staggering "drunken master" fighting style.

A picture with pop's delicious energy yet none of its attendant risk, a flick that no one will love but everyone will like.

Gilles Bourdos’s film is more conventional than its mould-breaking subjects deserve.

A giddy and fitfully amusing mashup of "Adventures in Babysitting," "Date Night," the Spy Kids franchise and, um, "Wet Hot American Summer," The Sleepover is the latest entry in Netflix’s experiment in catch-‘em-all entertainment.

Executed with more energy than either of Guy Ritchie’s recent blockbusters, and with Henry Cavill acting as a more suave Sherlock than Robert Downey Jr., director Harry Bradbeer’s adventure is a perfectly fine piece of Holmes-ian content, if not a work of actual, you know, cinema.

Baby it’s a wild film, but not Murray’s best and not Levinson’s either.

Serving as his own director of photography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, Soderbergh picks his angles artfully and allows Carano to demonstrate her arsenal of acrobatic fighting tricks in extended, no-cheating single takes.

Mulan is another competent effort, but it's a disappointment for anyone hoping the studio would raise the standard of the animated feature to a new level.

Individually, Dawson and Cassel each generate plenty of screen heat, but, together in that one bedroom scene, their chemistry is downright explosive, so much so that it seems we have strayed into a whole different movie, and dearly want to stay there.

The best thing about the film is the bromance between Lee and his weed dealer, Jeremy (Nick Offerman), which deepens into loveliness in one memorable scene.

This is a much more conventional film with fewer pretensions to high art. Violence exploited for mere entertainment is so commonplace it hardly seems worth noting.

The plot contracts classically as it approaches its delectably bizarre climax but Desperately Seeking Susan never achieves the hilarity it promises; it's a pleasant enough picture, and it has a bona-fide look, but it lacks a style. It also lacks the qualities essential to farce - pace, verve, timing, surprise. [02 Apr 1985]

As lovely to look at as it is dramatically inert.

Perhaps it’s the film’s predictability (and delightful corniness) that contributes to its charm.

The film's dramatic and thematic ends could have been served just as well, if not better, by skipping the invention and sticking to the no less gripping figures and the no less wrenching dilemmas that history actually provided. [21 Oct 1983]

The premise of Paris-Manhattan is simple enough; unfortunately, so is everything else about writer-director Sophie Lellouche’s debut feature film.

As a thriller, it's only fitfully suspenseful, and despite the ticking bomb premise, meanders a good deal in its plot convolutions. As a portrait of the absurdity and humiliation of life under occupation, the story is heartfelt but predictable.

The current postcard from abroad is not great, but not grating.

Land Ho! is both loose (shot over 18 days, with an improv quality to the acting) and overcalculated in its series of encounters, small revelations and life-affirming beats. The movie is pleasant and mostly forgettable, except for the character of Mitch.

Actor-turned-director Tony Goldwyn elicits solid performances from the cast, then undercuts them by resorting to a trite montage or a clunky set-piece, inevitably scored with an obtrusive rock tune telling us what to feel and when to feel it.

Like Pretty Woman, Green Card doesn't aim high - comedy, sentimentality, sex and pathos are sufficient for its scheme of fantasy things - but with the exception of MacDowell, it achieves its modest aims unerringly. [11 Jan 1991, p.C1]

For a stylish thriller that hinges on the titillating theme of voyeurism, this movie is surprisingly innocuos. [22 May 1993]

The time Bogdanovich spends with Rusty and Rocky, and the time Rocky spends at a summer camp for the blind with a gorgeous blonde (Laura Dern) who falls in love with him, is time that is priceless. The time Bogdanovich spends with the cuddly bikers, especially the time he spends with Sam Elliott in a dismally ingratiating, cockeyed performance as Rusty's boy friend, is time that exacts a terrible toll: credibility. [08 Mar 1985]

All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings.

Natali’s aesthetic exercise eventually outgrows his narrative trappings, and he’s forced to add unnecessary and foggy backstory to the source of the overgrown greenery.

To his credit, Beatty has designed Bulworth along the classic lines of Shakespeare's Fool -- the antic truth-speaker who has the ear of the court.

Strictly a middle-aged comedy, which consists of more easy lobs than sharp smacks, but manages to get the job done.

A political parody that is almost as ridiculous as actual American politics.

Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention.

The film sustains some suspense and brooding atmosphere for its first half, but eventually the clichés of character and dialogue drag it struggling to ground.

No character goes unscathed in this brutally violent movie, but Amirpour is especially careless with her black subjects – a painful misstep in an otherwise clear-eyed, unflinching critique of American despotism.

Needless to say, Belle is a handsome piece of selectively reupholstered history, but its lesson on the victories of social progress in England seems almost as narrowly perceived as Dido’s own view of the world from the immaculately trimmed Mansfield lawns.

As the careening cars go splat, splat, splat, the director's vision of the future looks like a cheerfully mindless combination of two extremes of carnival entertainment: demolition derby and whack-a-mole.

This is Austen as chick-lit, not too deep, but with some integrity and the worthy goal of reaching a younger audience by offering a starch-free version of the story.

Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.

No matter how strange it gets, or how distorted for political gain or refined for religious purposes, its essence is hard to pin down, even after a 2 1/2 -hour search.

Once again, Cianfrance handles the individual scenes with menacing aplomb but, once again, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

As a motion picture, Fever Pitch is merely competent.

The problem is that Chicken Little settles for what's expedient and safe and, over all, lives down to its title.

It’s Thompson who carries the film, both literally – she’s rarely off-screen – and emotionally.

Still: the Soronprfbs may be the best fake on-screen punk band since the Stains.